SmugKitZine Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

SoftInloveRox Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

Melanie Bouvet The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Kirpianuscus powerful. convincing. uncomfortable. or only a Cronenberg. admirable performances. and the wise science to use the plot possibilities in the right directions. a film about illness. or about illusion. or the need to escape from yourself. not original but perfect made. and this did it the perfect choice for the admirers of genre or director. short, one of films who remains in memory as the precise portrait of a state. who could be defined in many ways. but this is the source of fascination. a murder. and the looking for truth. different clues. and the deep solitude. and nothing more. that is all.

bendipa1 First of all, in order to fully appreciate Spider it requires more than a single viewing - at least 2 are necessary. Secondly,if you grew up in England, especially London, that would have helped, as many of the idioms spoken in this film, eg 'wicking' (as used by Yvonne Wilkinson - meaning 'annoying') were very much around in 1950s London. There are some other parochial phrases used which would be lost on most Americans. Curiously, looking at the subtitles for Spider a lot of the phrases have been wrongly interpreted, (probably compiled by Americans).Anyway, the first time I saw this, I didn't really get it either. At the same time I felt I hadn't given this film a proper chance, and when I did decide to revisit it I realized what a subtle, if strange and depressing movie it was. I've watched this several times since and on each occasion it became more fascinating, gradually dawning on me how much I'd missed in some of the more suggestive and important scenes. Eg, how many viewing this for the first time recognized that the actress playing Yvonne Wilkinson flashing her breast at young Spider, was not Miranda Richardson, who played Yvonne in all the subsequent scenes. There was a good reason for that of course. Also I realized why the imposing gasometer structure seen by Spider from his bedroom window seemed to terrify him. There are plenty of other examples. Once you notice what you missed first time around and more, you can appreciate this film so much better.But most viewers do not have the time or patience these days to allow a 'slow' film like Spider to develop, so naturally Spider will never see the light of day again for those with a short attention span. That's their loss though. You can make films about mental illness in a more entertaining way - eg. A Beautiful Mind. But in the end Spider digs that much deeper. Full credit to David Cronenberg for having the balls to make such an unconventional film, yet brilliant study of the schizophrenic mind. And needless to say Ralph Fiennes performance as the confused, mumbling Spider is extraordinary.

thismango In Spider, Cronenberg seems to have been trying to move into a new style, more visually subtle and without the reliance on special effects. Unfortunately, he has also started to toe the line politically and psychologically, losing the radical edge of some earlier films.The central performance by Fiennes as Clegg is technically interesting and appears at first to be a well researched and sympathetic approach to mental illness. His script (if you can call it a script) consists mostly of mumbling his own internal dialogue. His desperate attempt to make sense of his life by writing down childhood memories in his own invented language is quite moving. The character rings true to this extent.Cronenberg's typical multi-layered distortion of reality is present. The adult Clegg is shown as an observer at various key events in his childhood, telling us that we are seeing these events as memories in the present. Thanks. However, we never really know which are real and which are imagined. Did the blonde slapper in the pub exist at all? Did Clegg actually kill his mother or is this just another symbolic building block in his psychosis? His father's reaction to her death in the house seems unnaturally muted, which suggests this may be another figment - or is it just poor acting? The present-time action of the film takes place over just two or three days while he is living in a halfway house after release from a secure mental institution.This is a theoretically ambitious film, so I feel justified in judging it on theoretical grounds. It is strongly Freudian in its psychological theory. One of the first disturbances to Clegg's psyche comes when he finds his mother trying on a night-dress. He runs away when she says she's trying to make herself attractive for his father. This is obviously supposed to show the formation of the Oedipus complex which dominates the film's psychology. The Madonna-whore imagery of the blonde- and dark-haired mothers is also a rather heavy-handed effort at psychological or even esoteric depth.More disappointing is that there is no convincing explanation for Clegg's psychosis apart from Freudian dogma. It just happens, and isn't it a shame. The shame is that Cronenberg has backed away from the radically critical position of films like Videodrome to this completely orthodox embodiment of Freudian psychology and the organic disease model of mental illness.Spider takes itself very seriously, without having much to say. If it had been able to show some kind of inner aetiology from a contingent and biographical rather than a purely theoretical point of view, it could have been a decent drama.

Desertman84 Internal madness is hypnotically externalized in David Cronenberg's Spider, a disturbing portrait of schizophrenia that was adapted by Patrick McGrath from his celebrated novel.This drama stars Ralph Fiennes,Miranda Richardson and Gabriel Byrne.The film is a story of Dennis Cleg, a man who is given a room in a halfway house catering to mentally disturbed persons. Cleg has just been released from a mental institution and in his new abode starts piecing together or recreating in his memory an apparently fateful childhood event. He roams the nearby derelict urban area and the local canal and starts to relive or visualize a period of his childhood in 1950s London with his mother and his father. A shift takes place in the child's psyche when he witnesses his mother groping with his father in the garden and, subsequently, when he sees his mother in a silky night gown she wore for his father. The son, as a grown man seems to recreate in his memory the build up to his father's murder of his mother with the passive support of his mistress who then moves into the house and is presented as his mother. The young son then kills the mistress by gassing her in the kitchen. After that memory he attempts late one night to kill the landlady who sees alternatively as the mistress and his mother, he is taken back to the asylum.Cronenberg pieces together a compelling portrait of madness, but one which lacks the poignancy to be a rich, moving character study.Aside from that,it fails to connect with its audience and concludes in a contradictory and jumbled fashion.But despite of its flaws,this is one of the director's most accomplished films as it remains a pleasure to watch in such an understated treatment of potentially sensational subject matter.Also,Ralph Fiennes provides a brilliant and startling performance as a mentally ill person.